Why I Started Orangeba

I walked into a Thai textile factory in 2023 and saw something that shouldn't exist: a warehouse full of perfectly good fabric, tagged for incineration. These were beautiful pieces—silks, cottons, linens in colours that took someone weeks to get right. All of it was going to burn.

The buyer had changed their mind. The order got cancelled. Instead of finding another customer, the factory chose destruction. It was cheaper than storage. Faster than negotiating.

I asked the factory owner: how often does this happen? His answer: every season. Millions of metres of deadstock.

The moment it clicked

I realised something obvious and overlooked: the most sustainable piece of clothing isn't a new design. It's fabric that already exists. And there's enough of it to dress a small nation.

The industry talks about innovation and new materials. But the real innovation was staring at me in that warehouse: intercept the waste that's already happening, before it becomes landfill.

Built differently from day one

Orangeba exists to prove a single thing: you don't need a green premium to do the right thing. Good fabric, fair price, no mythology. We work directly with factories, skip the middleman markup, and pass the savings to you.

Every piece we make starts as someone else's deadstock. Our dresses, our basics, our entire first collection came from cancelled orders and surplus runs. We designed them to be kept, not replaced next season.

Why this matters now

The fashion industry made 92 million tonnes of textile waste last year. That's not a statistic. That's millions of warehouses like the one I walked into. Millions of perfectly good fabrics burning.

If we rescue even a fraction of that waste, we reduce water use, cut emissions, and build an industry that actually respects materials.

That's why Orangeba exists.